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Hey guys I have a question I'm working my way through the book Introduction to 3D Game Programming in DirectX 10 and I'm at the point where I'm working with meshes and while I'm on the topic I decided that I wanted to try and build my own 3D model loader functionality for some other 3D model file types than what is covered in the book (which happens to be .3DS). Now what it is that I'm trying to figure out is:

1:) what are some other common 3D file formats that I could work with.
2:) what file formats hold animation information
3:) Also on a side note something else I'm trying to figure out related to this is that I want to put in functionality where the user can open an menu and select a 3D model file and have the application load it the part I'm unsure of is the open file dialog box, Now I have quite a bit of experience with building windows event based applications with text boxes and such and I have somewhat of an idea of how to do this but I'm just wondering if there may be some functionality built in to DirectX that would make the task easier than its looking like to me.

I'm not looking for anybody to give me the answer I'm more than happy to do the leg work just looking for some good info that I can use to expand upon.

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1:) The Wavefront OBJ format is imported to my engine because it is exported from all the big modeling appilcations, easy to understand, close to the engine's internal representation and have an example of how to load in the DirectX SDK.

If you want to avoid multiple internal representations with bugs that are specific to a format that you rarely use, make your own text based model format that is almost as fast as binary files by using C strings and memory recycling for parsing. Then you can import from anything you need in your model edtior and put on some shaders.

2:) MD3 is easy to understand and can handle facial animation but takes a lot of memory by storing the position of each vertex. There is no solution that works for everything and making your own bone animation tool would make you less depending on an expensive modeling application. Be careful when reading the license so that you don't have to pay for an obsoleted patent.